Shortly after we set up our temporary camp here in New Mexico, we gave the wind a name: we call it Bruno. If you’ve been living under a rock and somehow don’t get the reference to the incredibly catchy “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”, enjoy:
After living in the swamp of the east coast for nearly a decade, spending several years on the side of a mountain in Montana, and living in Islamabad’s 100+ degree heat & 100+ % humidity, I thought I had a handle on weather.
Feet of snow?
Cool, we have the tools and gear for that.
Barefoot snow yoga? Refreshing.
Air so thick with moisture you can nearly slice it?
I don’t love it, but I can deal.
Dry heat that makes your skin feel baked-through?
Also not my favorite, but I’ve accepted that now we live in the desert and heat is something I’ll come to terms with. Plus, now that our well is successfully pumping water, I have a stock tank swimming pool.
What I hadn’t truly accounted for in our move to the desert of New Mexico?
Wind.
Apparently, it gets windy out here. (Which we knew, on paper, when we bought our land. Turns out, experiencing 50+ mph gusting on the regular isn’t quite the same as intellectually knowing a place gets wind.)
The wind is, apparently, worst in the spring. Otherwise known as right when we arrived at our land, without any significant shelter or traditional rigid protection from the elements. And as we’d talk about the wind in an effort to grapple with our shock and dismay, it seemed to summon this element as if we were inviting it out to play.
So, we started to call it Bruno.
Here’s a quick video of Bruno playing games shortly after our arrival. This was in the first few days on our land, before our bell tent arrived, and after a rough night of high winds, we’d taken the precaution of cinching down our other tent so it wouldn’t be ripped to shreds. I’ll be honest, this was also around the time I started to wonder if we’d made a huge mistake buying this land.
The thing about wind is, it’s uniquely maddening. Unlike rain or snow or cloud cover or even temperature, it doesn’t follow predictable patterns or give visual indicators.1 It surges and recedes, dances around you, shifts direction on a whim, and offers false hope of subsidence before whipping through once more. If I decided to anthropomorphize the weather patterns, Bruno would definitely be a chaotic, nap-deprived, pre-school boy on a sugar high.2
While we discovered our weather apps (and local weather station—we use a platform call Tempest, which we have dubbed “the lying liar”) were dubious predictors at best, we eventually started to notice trends: which direction the wind would come from based on the temperature, and how much gusting would actually be problematic. When the forecast meant we’d need to batten down the hatches, so to speak. Which direction and temperature combination meant we’d be awoken at midnight when the winds shifted to experience what we’ve dubbed “washing machine wind”— sudden gusts and abrupt directional pivots that buckled the heavy duty canvas of our bell tent and delivered a heavy helping of anxiety.
We bemoaned Bruno for March, and April, and into May. We cursed him at night when he kept us awake and one time, early on, even led us to sleep in our truck to feel safe. We yelled into the wind, our voices swept away into the void, as we tried to build and move and manage equipment and solar panels and structures that weren’t designed for this particular element.
And then, thunderstorm season arrived. This paired Bruno’s offerings with the crackling lightning and thunder and the monsoon rains that come to the desert each monsoon season. Yay.
Living in a tent—even a robust, expedition-style one—has really invited me to reconsider my relationship with weather. We have the luxury of living this way by choice and knowing it’s a temporary scenario, but it’s still a sobering experience when you find yourself surrounded by extreme winds as the skies darken, watching the lightning strike count on your weather app rise into the multiple hundreds. Heck, we even got a tornado warning. That’s about when I decided to hide under our desk (inside of our tent) until the worst of the storm passed…
As we’ve moved into the heat of the summer—we marked our first 100+ degree day earlier in June—we’ve made a tenuous peace with Bruno. After all, the same driving wind that threatened structures and sanity earlier in the year, now keeps the flies and gnats at bay and offers a cooling breeze when it’s otherwise hot, hot, hot.
Living with Bruno and with the elements so closely over the past five months has invited me to think differently about our relationship with the world around us. In the past, even on a multi-day backpacking trip, the elements have felt novel, even charming. I recall a backpacking trip in Shenandoah where we hiked through a downpour and pitched our tent on the high ground, surrounded by a lake of precipitation for the rest of the weekend. Or a 14er attempt in Colorado where we had high-altitude snow that kept us snuggled up in our sleeping bags. These were adventures. They were temporary. I knew I had the promise of return to a rigid, climate-controlled building to protect me from the elements. And in most cases and experiences across my life, I’ve relied on air conditioning and insulation rather than encountering the actual temperatures in the world around me. I’ve been shielded from the wind by walls, roofs, vehicles, and other human barriers.
I’ve been fortunate in my life to avoid truly catastrophic weather scenarios. I’ve never lived through a hurricane, a tsunami, or a tornado. And, I hope this will be true for me into the future. Yet living this way makes me realize how fragile the boundary really is between our human selves and this wild world in which we live. It also, I’ve learned, brings my emotions considerably closer to the surface. I was intrigued to observe how closely intertwined my moods were to the day’s weather: I’ve long known that unmanaged heat makes me grumpy, but I’ve since learned that winds make me anxious and impatient, whittling down my tolerance for anything unexpected to the narrowest margin. This experience makes me curious about the ways elements and weather have existed as symbols, placeholders, and explanatory plot devices across the human experience, from Chinese Medicine to the Wheel of the Year, from cultural myths to agricultural memory.
As we grapple with a changing world and a climate that is increasingly unpredictable, living with the elements for this chapter of my own life underscores how temporary the structures and protections we’ve established to separate ourselves from the wild truly are, and how, at the end of the day, we’re all simply seeking shelter from the storm.
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Clearly an opportunity for a wind scientist to correct me here with actual knowledge.
Says the childfree-by-choice woman.
A great read, thank you for your insights.
This part, right here, really struck me profoundly:
"These were adventures. They were temporary. I knew I had the promise of return to a rigid, climate-controlled building to protect me from the elements. And in most cases and experiences across my life, I’ve relied on air conditioning and insulation rather than encountering the actual temperatures in the world around me. I’ve been shielded from the wind by walls, roofs, vehicles, and other human barriers."
Because many people like myself and you haven't pondered the alternatives because we haven't had to. And it sounds like this is opening up so much for you internally on this journey. A fascinating read. I wonder how you will feel about Bruno after your home is built?